Monday, 30 November 2015

Also published on my Festival of Britain 1951 blogspot (see link at foot of post)

Before the
opening credits of ‘The Magic Box’ (1951), the Festival of Britain logo flashes
onto the screen. The film was shown at the Festival, before it went on general
release. We can therefore assume that it was meant to fit in with the ethos of
the Festival – a celebration of British achievement. It certainly showcases the
best of contemporary acting talent, with a long list of stars performing in
tiny cameo roles. Some parts are so tiny, it is literally a case of blink and
you will miss them. I certainly missed
seeing Googie Withers, Sheila Sim and Marius Goring. Others have slightly more
prominent five-minute pieces, giving us a taste of the kind of role that they
were famous for. Margaret Rutherford as a bossy yet coquettish dame, Laurence
Olivier as an incredulous policeman, Joyce Grenfell as a fussy spinster and
Eric Portman as an angry businessman. I
could go on. It is a veritable pageant of drama skills.

The talent is a
literal celebration of British film-making. But the storyline also looks at the
life of film pioneer William Friese-Greene (played by Robert Donat). Fitting in with the Festival’s celebration of
British science, it seems to say – ‘Look! It was us that invented film! But we
are so modest with our achievements while other nationalities blow their own
trumpets so loudly that they drown us out!’

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Having watched
the film myself, I wasn’t impressed with the character of Friese-Greene. He is
portrayed as a very selfish man, who puts his inventing before his wives and his
children. His first wife dies of ill health – the film suggests that this was
exacerbated by the debts that her husband ran up by eschewing proper work. He
marries again and his six sons are all shown as suffering from his single
minded attitude. In the end, three of them join World War One as under age
soldiers in order to stop becoming a financial burden on their parents. This
second marriage ends when his wife can take no more. He apparently destroyed the opportunity to
become a rich society photographer because of his obsession with developing a
moving picture. I was flabbergasted at
this – surely he could have invented at evenings and weekends? This is how the rest of us have to follow our
dreams!

I wonder if the
1951 audience took a different attitude? Were they meant to view him with sympathy as
a man who gave up everything and got no recognition for his ground breaking
work? This would sit more comfortably
with the Festival ethos. Does ‘The Magic Box’ depict a long gone set of values,
when it was understandable to put genius before family? When a man could get
away more easily with neglecting his sons? A fascinating question of 1950s
morals and mores.

Monday, 9 November 2015

Being
something of a sewing fan, the wartime catchphrase “make do and mend” makes me
immediately think of clothing.This is
what the phrase was often referring to in its everyday use.Make do with your old clothes, patch them up,
transform your curtains into a frock etc.But then a film that I watched recently broadened my make-do-mend
horizons. The film was called ‘Bang! You’re Dead.’ It
was made in 1954 and stars Jack Warner.Warner plays a woodsman who lives with his seven year old son.As he works in the woods, his son is left
free to roam.Inevitably, the boy is
drawn to an abandoned U.S. military base, where he plays in the huts and on the
old jeeps scattered around the yard. One day, while rummaging around his
playground, the boy finds a revolver. He uses it to play highwaymen with a man
on a bicycle, and unwittingly shoots the cyclist dead.An innocent man is then accused of murder and
the rest of the film is taken up with the investigations.

My “make do
and mend” moment concerned the housing depicted in the film. Warner and his son
live in a Nissen hut, a large semi-circular, corrugated iron construction. They
form a row of such dwellings; the inhabitants having done their best to
transform them into cosy cottages. They
keep hens in their gardens, grow their own vegetables and hang out their
washing to dry among the bushes and trees.
At a glance, filmed in the summertime, it all looks quite idyllic. Surely this wouldn’t have been so cosy in the
wintertime when the wind howled across bare gardens and through the gaps in the
corrugated sheets. Not really somewhere
that you’d want to live all year round.
Possibly these huts depicted in the film were meant to have been
connected with the U.S. base. There were
many of these Nissen huts sprouting up throughout World War Two – they were
cheap preformed structures that were quick to get into place. They were used in
many wartime developments such as military bases and prisoner of war camps.
When their original use was no longer necessary, then the “make do and mend”
mentality meant that they were often put to varied peacetime uses, from homes
to playgrounds to pigsties.

Jack Warner by @aitchteee

Coincidentally,
another use for Nissen huts was brought to my attention just a day or two after
watching the film.I work for a charity
that supports people who have become ill as a result of asbestos exposure.I was given a case study of a teacher who had
developed Mesothelioma as a result of working in Nissen huts that had been
converted into school classrooms.The
insides of the huts had been coated in an asbestos impregnated material.The pinning and stapling of work to walls had
released the deadly fibres into his lungs. Unbeknownst to Jack Warner, those
huts on the abandoned base held something more deadly that the abandoned
revolver with a single bullet left in it.This is, of course, aside from other diseases linked to living in damp
and unsanitary conditions.One suspects
that the wife and mother of the woodsman and his boy succumbed to pneumonia or something
similar.

So it
transpires that there were two kinds of “make do and mend”. A good sort, where materials were looked
after, reused and resources preserved.
One that some are now trying to return to in response to our throwaway
culture. But there was a side that we
would not want to return to, one which forced people into makeshift homes and
workplaces. We are still feeling the
consequences of this.

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